Set between the sound and the sea, Long Island is home to some of America’s most intriguing country houses. This book highlights the best examples, telling the story of each through outstanding contemporary color photography.
The dwellings, which began as 17th-century homesteads and 18th-century, high-style plantation manor houses, embody centuries of ownership and building activity—an aesthetic evolution shaped by both Dutch and English colonial influences and proximity to the cultural crossroads of Long Island Sound and New York City. These many-layered homes, both large and small, have anchored successive generations engaged in living well amid evolving American taste, each generation expanding, altering, and redefining them in accordance with popular trends and personal eccentricities.
Representing the best of maverick Americana, their charmed interiors exude warmth, comfort, and familiarity and contain wonderful old objects and materials that will satiate all who hunger for old houses.
Set between the sound and the sea, Long Island is home to some of America’s most intriguing country houses. This book highlights the best examples, telling the story of each through outstanding contemporary color photography.
The dwellings, which began as 17th-century homesteads and 18th-century, high-style plantation manor houses, embody centuries of ownership and building activity—an aesthetic evolution shaped by both Dutch and English colonial influences and proximity to the cultural crossroads of Long Island Sound and New York City. These many-layered homes, both large and small, have anchored successive generations engaged in living well amid evolving American taste, each generation expanding, altering, and redefining them in accordance with popular trends and personal eccentricities.
Representing the best of maverick Americana, their charmed interiors exude warmth, comfort, and familiarity and contain wonderful old objects and materials that will satiate all who hunger for old houses.
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Overview
Set between the sound and the sea, Long Island is home to some of America’s most intriguing country houses. This book highlights the best examples, telling the story of each through outstanding contemporary color photography.
The dwellings, which began as 17th-century homesteads and 18th-century, high-style plantation manor houses, embody centuries of ownership and building activity—an aesthetic evolution shaped by both Dutch and English colonial influences and proximity to the cultural crossroads of Long Island Sound and New York City. These many-layered homes, both large and small, have anchored successive generations engaged in living well amid evolving American taste, each generation expanding, altering, and redefining them in accordance with popular trends and personal eccentricities.
Representing the best of maverick Americana, their charmed interiors exude warmth, comfort, and familiarity and contain wonderful old objects and materials that will satiate all who hunger for old houses.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780764357862 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Schiffer Publishing, Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2019 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.60(w) x 11.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE HOMESTEAD
Nissequogue
The most satisfying approach to the Homestead is the same as it was hundreds of years ago: over the glistening currents of the sound, into Smithtown Bay, and onward across the clear, black-bottomed waters of Stony Brook Harbor. Here the horizon is all shoreline, with twin encircling ribbons of chartreuse saltwater grasses and green tree canopies separated by pebbled beach. Lackadaisical birds linger in the air, and tiny minnows school below.
Completing the tableaux at the end of the seventeenth century were wood-clad houses surrounded by clearings. At that time, perched on the western shore far from the mouth of the harbor, stood a little house with its back to a quiet hill. Its site formed part of a large area of land purchased in the 1660s by Richard Smith from Lion Gardiner of Gardiners Island, who had received the land from Sachem Wyandanch several years prior.
Thirty years later, in 1725, you would find a busier bay, with that small house just a bit more sophisticated. Ebenezer Smith grafted an addition onto the original house, which became a subsidiary wing. The larger new section presented a neat three-bay façade with two full stories. It was an example of architectural progression in this burgeoning community, whose homes still lacked flourishes such as dormers and welcoming porches. Within a few decades the main section was again expanded to a full five-bay length, bookended by the original chimney stack and a new eastern chimney.
During the nineteenth century, notes of casual ease crept in. A wraparound porch upended the simplicity of the exterior, running across the main five-bay section. It provided a wonderful place to take in the view, to be sure, but it was an ungainly addition for such a tightly conceived building. All else remained substantially the same, and the house stayed in Smith family hands until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was purchased by William Dixon.
Dixon sought a smart Long Island farmhouse, an early-twentieth-century idealization of the island's colonial-era homestead houses favoring gentility and economy in equal measure — a stark contrast to the Gold Coast epoch that was winding down just as Dixon arrived. He commissioned Peabody, Wilson & Brown to discreetly insert modern conveniences and light Colonial Revival flourishes. The involvement of practicing architects, rather than talented builders or gentleman-designers, was a fairly new phenomenon on the island.
The house's existing simplicity and atmosphere guided the architects, who sympathetically adjusted the interior, preserving much of the dining-room paneling while creating a new eastern sitting room out of two smaller spaces. A new porch along the eastern depth of the house was sited to take in the morning light just above the beach below. The unusual staircase in the central hall, its rail supported by a single beveled panel rather than balusters, was retained for its solid charm rather than obliterated in favor of a lighter arrangement.
The exterior received a full Colonial Revival touch-up. Graphic shutters, paneled on the first floor and louvered on the second, introduced a sense of hierarchy to the overall massing and emphasized the dominance of the eighteenth-century section of the house. The shutterless older wing is an appendage that visually terminates in the adjacent pump house. Both sections acquired fashionable and practical dormer windows, lifting the perceived height of the façade, its rhythm further modulated by simple trim.
Today, the more usual approach to the Homestead, now back in Smith family hands, is by land. A long road runs through a dense woods, heightening the moment when a small rise opens up to fields and lawn that cascade down to the beach and bay beyond. The graveled lane rolls down this landscape and passes a scattered village of barns, garages, and stables before quickly ending in front of the house.
Traipsing across the gravel, you are drawn into the house — through the front door, through the stair hall — and just as quickly you are pulled out — through the garden door at the other end of the hall. A perfect small lawn, partially enclosed by boxwood, provides a sheltered spot to take in the astonishing view of the shimmering bay that laps at the pebbled beach below. Inevitably, the house lures you back inside, its unaffected interiors an amalgam of patterned wallpapers and colonial paneling, simple furniture, and tasteful rugs. It all adds up to an aesthetic balm. Everything feels settled; a sense of ease pervades the whole.
WILLOW HILL
Springs
Restraint and simplicity are the hallmarks of sophistication. Often confused with luxury or the absence of decorative effect, these virtues mark the paradoxical grandeur of humility. This middle-path philosophy dovetails neatly with rescuing the beau ideal of an old house, one untouched by the fashions of the immediately preceding decades. It takes a rare marriage of self-awareness and vision to guide an untouched atmosphere into the present day, a balance between the need to accommodate the present without eradicating the patina of the past. Willow Hill is a demonstration of excellence, where the architecture and atmosphere of the past are seamlessly grafted onto the present.
Peter Bickford and Greg McCarthy longed to rehabilitate a house innocent of messy twentieth-century intrusions, and when, during a bicycle ride, they came across Willow Hill, inhabited for decades by the same tenant, they had found a house to savor.
Willow Hill, its first portion built during the early eighteenth century, is idyllically situated south of the great salt hay meadows of Accabonac Harbor and originally formed the nucleus of a small homestead. Perhaps the finest example of a central-chimney farmhouse in the Springs, it reveals a clever, thoughtful evolution throughout the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, the southern portion expanded during the former, and a perfect, minute kitchen wing added during the latter. When first constructed, it was undoubtedly a conservative building, a small house with its chimney stack on one side. Later, the stack was surrounded by rooms during a period of expansion to create a balanced three-bay facade.
Inside, the furnishings lend a self-assured feeling, with antiques casually placed about a series of rooms that are remarkably airy despite their cozy dimensions, in part because of well-placed windows. Bickford and McCarthy exerted a very light touch. For instance, when opened, the front door blocked the delightfully petite imperial stair. A new double-leaf door configuration now sweeps open, one leaf's hinges built to accommodate a slight variation in the floor surface without completely blocking views toward either sitting room from the entrance.
Peter and Greg salvaged a Connecticut barn to replace an original barn that had been removed prior to their ownership of Willow Hill. Positioned across the lawn and screened from the house by carefully placed trees, the repurposed barn represents an appropriate new stage in the property's evolution. Rather than graft a new addition to the main building, the couple expanded their space with an ancillary structure, much as on an early Long Island homestead.
SAGTIKOS MANOR
Islip
Sagtikos Manor is a sprawling, delightfully surreal circuit of rooms, hallways, porches, and stairs — a marriage of daffy architecture and cohesive furnishings. Last owned by Robert D. L. Gardiner, who claimed to be the sixteenth Lord of the Manor of Gardiners Island, Sagtikos is the arena where he reimagined and reinterpreted decorative and family history. His own taste and that of his family — by turns charming, unwieldy, and manic — survives and suits the house, which comprises three distinct sections dating from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries.
Throughout the interior an unusually artistic array of repeating colors animate painted surfaces, patterned papers, and battered fabrics, unifying rooms that range from intimately scaled, eighteenth-century bedrooms to a twentieth-century dining room of robber baron proportions. The color of crushed pride is found throughout, complemented by a self-assured viridian that appears just as frequently as various wet sand greiges and sea lettuce greens, with oyster whites and stained woods moderating the overall palette.
But on the exterior, now stained white with dark shutters, it is evident from the varied rooflines that color alone could not unify the architectural and decorative schemes that composed, over time, a rambling farmhouse of such gargantuan scale.
The house began small and stout, built by the ambitious Stephanus Van Cortlandt, New York City's first American-born mayor. During the summer of 1697 he received not one but two manorial grants: Cortlandt along the Hudson River and Sagtikos on Long Island's southern shore. On this unusual island grant — miles long but only several hundred feet wide — he built a six-room house resembling the house later built by the Floyds of Mastic. The Hudson property received most of Van Cortlandt's attention, however, and by the Georgian era, Sagtikos was owned by the Thompsons, prosperous farmers who expanded the house. A new kitchen wing dwarfed the original kitchen, and the rest of the house was integrated into a five-bay-wide Georgian block. These rooms, all perfectly scaled for happy chats and confidential gossip, supported a façade of mildly grand pretension overlooking country fields and marshland. Its nascent sophistication greeted British troops during the Revolution, and, afterward, President Washington himself during his Long Island tour.
Walking through these comfortably scaled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rooms today, it is a great surprise to pass through Thompson's new parlor into the soaring, cubic volume of the twentieth-century music room, as large as the entire Georgian-era addition. With its seemingly infinite expanse of paneled wall and Arts & Crafts inglenook, this is a sudden encounter with a very different mindset. The music room was added in 1905 by Frederick Diodati Thompson, who inherited the house and commissioned architect Isaac H. Green to aggrandize the family seat in the years immediately following the Gilded Age.
Green finished the music room exterior with a deep wraparound porch, an addition that would have unbalanced the existing building if not for the massive northern wing he also designed — a gambrel-roofed appendage equivalent in volume to all the rooms already described. It connects to the older house through the original Van Cortlandt kitchen, and there is a curious moment of stepping from the early, low-ceilinged space — which Green treated as an antechamber — into the 1905 high-ceilinged stair hall, its walls covered in flamboyant peacock wallpaper. Beyond the stair hall are numerous entertaining and service rooms requested by Diodati Thompson, and upstairs are many bedrooms.
Its grand scale notwithstanding, Green's northern addition does not display the architectural hubris that Edith Wharton despised. Instead, it defers to the older parts of the house. The addition has no formal entrance, only north and south porches that speak of lingering, casual days. The addition is perpendicular to the Van Cortlandt and Thompson sections, and the music room's roofline is a continuation of those earlier sections.
Robert D. L. Gardiner inherited Sagtikos in all its delicious sprawl, complete with assorted outbuildings, garages, and a walled garden. While he also maintained a house in East Hampton, he gravitated to the grandeur of Gardiner's Island and the status of the south fork, transmuting Sagtikos into a part-time decorative and historical laboratory. A sui generis character prone to bluster, but not without charm, he appreciated the power of dramatic flair, and it is this quality that permitted him to contribute to Sagtikos's history without building another imposing wing.
Under his stewardship, the house evolved from being a family home to a museum without occupants. Yet, unlike many house museums, which are often rather humorless interpretations of a single period, this museum is a sort of wormhole, each room indelibly stamped by the time in which it was built, while connecting to past and succeeding decades through the wonderful decorative dramas of several centuries. Sagtikos's lively variety is unified by Gardiner's distinct vision, by turns serious and tongue in cheek. He brought in furniture to augment its decorative inventory and rearranged furnishings for beauty rather than historical effect — a strategy its current stewards have continued with great success. The overall effect is as salt to a meal, bringing out the house's deeper flavors of charm and history.
TURBILLON
Mill Neck
Turbillon sits on a meandering country lane overlooking gardens, pony paddocks, and shimmering Beaver Lake. It is a quintessential Long Island farmhouse with a multitude of later additions — a lovely arrangement with Colonial Revival influences. The immediate landscape contains many of the North Shore's characteristic charms, from saltwater inlets and hills shaded by deciduous trees to the gardens woven in between.
The house nestles laterally into the gentle rise of a hill, and its length reflects many stages of growth. At first glance, the lovely main block appears symmetrical but is in fact asymmetrical. Built at the start of the eighteenth century, the house was expanded several decades later when a side-hall three-bay block was added on the west. The Underhill family purchased the property in the 1760s and reconfigured the eastern wing to create a center hall.
Slowly the house grew, a metamorphosis of vernacular architecture guided by talented craftsmen and North Shore building traditions. By the end of the nineteenth century, the main block was joined to a substantial new service wing, the whole sheltered beneath a broad roof. Minimal exterior detailing gave the house a monastic simplicity, and its length belied its relatively compact nature. Inside, however, charming provincial paneling and an impressive stair hall demonstrated an exuberant attitude.
Katherine Culver Williams purchased this long, lean house in 1927. A wealthy widow from Manhattan, she embraced the farm with spirited fervor. What had formerly been a working homestead became a genteel country retreat, and Williams lavished the house with details that spoke of light and views rather than shelter and hearth. New dormer windows brought light to the third floor, and in the dining room, new French windows made a visual connection to the garden.
Best of all was the addition of a marvelous, two-story porch on the north face of the main block, the second floor screened in as a delightful sleeping porch on warm summer nights.
Resembling a rural Vermont tree house, the sleeping porch enjoys views of the blowsy grasses and trees below in grounds walled off from the road — a miniature parkland that rises up to hillside gardens. Across the lane and paddock is the lake. Formerly a tidal creek, it was flooded at the turn of the twentieth century to give local landowners a place for fishing and winter sports.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the nineteenth-century service wing, found to be structurally compromised, was reconfigured in a neocolonial manner, the new grafted onto the old, a further building on the efforts of previous generations. The current interiors are equally layered, the furnishings a medley of good antiques, colorful carpets, and the usual accoutrements of a life lived out of doors as much as in. The effervescent red-papered dining room, with its row of French windows showcasing the green outdoors, feels happy and assured.
For sixty years the current family has cared for this gentleperson's farm. At the top of the hill, the horse barn, chicken coop, and sheds built by Mrs. Williams have been preserved through continual use and maintenance. Though the house's namesake comes from a summer residence of the Bishops of Sion, this place of cultivated pleasure serves as a residence throughout the year, its singular atmosphere nurtured to understated excellence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Farmhouse and Manors of Long Island Americana"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Kyle Marshall.
Excerpted by permission of Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword, 6,
Introduction Albertson-Meyer House, Carl J. Schmidlapp House, East Farm, Foxland, Powell Farmhouse, Raynham Hall, Youngs Farm, 11,
The Houses,
The Homestead, Nissequogue, 23,
Willow Hill, Springs, 37,
Sagtikos Manor, Islip, 45,
Turbillon, Mill Neck, 57,
Rock Hall, Lawrence, 73,
The Henry Lloyd and,
Joseph Lloyd Manor Houses, Lloyd Neck, 83,
Thatch Meadow Farm, Head of the Harbor, 95,
Hay Fever, Locust Valley, 107,
Cedarmere, Roslyn, 121,
Carhart House, Lattingtown, 133,
Old Mastic, Mastic, 145,
Casa Blanca, Lattingtown, 159,
Point Place, Miller Place, 169,
Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, 183,
Terry-Mulford House, Orient, 195,
Acknowledgments, 204,
Resources, 205,
Bibliography, 206,